In the course of day-to-day work, users often need to access information stored in various content repositories such as line of business applications, on-line newspapers, and web-based research sites. Finding the information stored in these content repositories involves searching multiple applications and sites, generally by loading a web page or an application associated with the desired information, performing a search, and then repeating this process for each content repository.
Web search sites index web pages to facilitate searching, but not all sites can be indexed with this method. For example, subscription sites may allow queries but not indexing, and many on-line stores that dynamically build product information pages from information in databases cannot be indexed, although they may be searched.